Interesting graves in South Australia: William Light

I sometimes wonder how many people passing through Light Square realise that the founder and designer of Adelaide, Colonel William Light, is buried there?
Colonel Light’s controversial encounters with South Australian bureaucracy was to end in a like manner. Shunned by Adelaide society for living with a woman, he became too ill in January 1839 to work and eventually was too weak to leave his bed at his Thebarton home and was nursed by his companion, supporters and friends.
Boyle Travers Finniss (Light’s assistant surveyor and subsequently the Colony’s first Premier) and his wife did what they could to help and console the dying man. Finniss tried to get the Colonial Chaplain, Revd Charles Beaumont Howard, to visit Light when he was dying, but Howard would not because of Light’s refusal to repent and end his liaison with Maria Gandy.
Light died just after midnight on the morning of 6 October, with Finniss and Woodforde in attendance.
While scant attention was given to Light by the authorities, this attitude changed after his death and on 10 October there was a most impressive funeral with a service held in Trinity Church by the Colonial Chaplain. Guns were fired in salute and the body taken in a grand procession for burial in Light Square.
Inside the coffin was a brass breastplate inscribed, Founder of Adelaide. The Register with its columns bordered in black, gave a lengthy description of the service and claimed that nearly 450 gentlemen, all in deep mourning, followed the body from the Church to the Square.

Sources:
David Elder, William Light’s brief journal and Australian diaries, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1984 p50.
Register; 12 October 1839